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Hands Off Our Bodies, Hands Off Our Future
I’m a climate justice organizer. Here's why I’m fighting for reproductive justice.
May 24, 2026
Earlier this year, in a horrific conversation with white supremacist podcaster Joe Rogan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who started Facebook to rank women’s appearances in 2004, argued that the tech world needs more masculine energy.
Any serious look at the tech world and it’s clear it’s a space already overrun by the male ultra-wealthy class: 88.92% of IT CEOs alone are white men. This is the same cultural demographic and argument now overtaking our governmental systems as well. It’s an arrogance that demands control of all, from the bodies of women, trans folks, queer folks, and young people, to violent control of our environment, the plants, animals, landscapes, and non-human bodies that provide the world’s strength.
Days after serial-sexual-assaulter and white supremacist Donald Trump won the 2024 US presidential election, neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes tweeted, “Your body; my choice.” At his inauguration, Trump proclaimed (insert characteristic Trump voice), “We’re going to drill, baby, drill.”
These two statements are deeply related, echoing the same narratives of control, extraction, exploitation, and domination over our bodies, relatives, and communities.
Our movements must understand the intuitive reality that the attacks on reproductive rights, on reproductive access, and on our bodily autonomy are the same attacks as those on our environment.
All of this is why I found myself outside the Philadelphia Women’s Center near my college on February 8. With dozens of local community members from the grassroots organization Abortion Rights Philadelphia, we chanted, “Abortion is a human right, not just for the rich and white.” Together, we sang Chappell Roan and Beyoncé, building a wall of joy between the clinic’s patients and the masses of anti-abortion protesters, by and large older white men, who had gathered with dramatized pictures of fetuses, attempting to dox and scare patients from accessing their healthcare.
Attacks on the Environment are Attacks on Reproductive Rights
Our movements must understand the intuitive reality that the attacks on reproductive rights, on reproductive access, and on our bodily autonomy are the same attacks as those on our environment. And we must understand the inverse as well.
As New York City-based Afro-Puerto Rican reproductive and climate justice activist Hennessy García points out, “Where we see environmental injustice, we see reproductive injustice as well.” They go hand in hand.
For example, breathing in polluted air increases the likelihood for pregnant people to give birth prematurely. The same is true for exposure to water pollution, toxins from superfund sites and brownfields, proximity to fossil fuel infrastructure, and the effects of extreme heat. All of these environmental hazards are, by and large, located in communities of color, especially low-income communities, across the country. This means that when Trump chants, “Drill, baby, drill” and loosens our already weak environmental protections, he’s putting pregnant people of color at risk of both climate and environmental injustices and harms.
This is also the case for women and transgender or non-binary (TGNB), intersex, and LGBTQIA+ people, independent of pregnancy, and for disabled people as well, due to societal structure, gendered roles, discrimination, and resource inequity. It is also true that sexual violence rates for women and TGNB folks increase significantly in the aftermath of climate disasters.
The clear takeaway here: Women and TGNB people’s lives and sexual and reproductive health are being threatened by Trump, fossil fuel companies, and their Democratic allies, worsening climate and environmental crises.
The Goal is Domination
This is all intentional. While Trump bars the words “environmental justice,” “gender,” “female,” “women,” and “pregnancy” from federal agencies and refers to Gaza and Palestine as “demolition site[s],” he also pushes a proposal of a $5,000 cash “baby bonus” to every American mother after delivery. The Trump administration wants women, on one hand, to reproduce endlessly, and on the other hand, it condemns women in Black and brown communities to death, displacement, and genocide. Whether those be Black and brown communities overburdened by fossil fuels and extractive infrastructure, by police brutality and deportation, or whether they be like in Gaza, by incessant deadly bombardment.
Look at Elon Musk and his 14 children with four different younger women. In November, he tweeted, “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.” As Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian argues, “It’s easy for Musk, who will never have to carry any of the children he’s so keen on having, to be blasé about pregnancy risks: He can outsource them all,” pointing to one of his partners, Grimes, who almost died during the pregnancy of their son X Æ A-12.
As Garcia says, “People with the ability to get pregnant are not machines.” But that’s exactly what the Trump-Musk administration wants.
It’s all, ultimately, about building logics for masculine control across every area of our lives, bodies, and world.
They want those who fit into their racialized view of “America” to reproduce endlessly, and they want those who don’t to be oppressed, to work as capital creators, and to, in many cases, die.
There’s a deep, contradictory nature to this logic. On one hand, Trump is trying to stop people of color from accessing abortion or contraceptive care, and on the other, he is trying to literally facilitate their deaths. And for white women, he’s encouraging them to give birth as much as possible, yet still not offering childcare or maternal care—instead, he scrubs the word “pregnancy” from the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s offering $5,000 to women who give birth—a measly sum compared to the $237,482 it takes to raise a child in the US—and simultaneously plans to limit childcare and eliminate Head Start. Ultimately, it’s not just about eugenic-reminiscent reproductive policy; it’s about control. It’s about strategic destabilization, whether it’s control of land—from Black, brown, and Indigenous communities to Gaza, Panama, and Greenland—or control of bodies and reproductive, life-making capacities, from Nick Fuentes’ “Your body; my choice” to the aforementioned actions of the administration. It’s also about exploitation, whether it’s mass deportations or labor exploitation, like the forms of slavery and exploitation for incarcerated individuals appearing across the country, from Louisiana to California.
Layer in the climate crisis and mass inaffordability, and this image of control becomes an even more frightening picture.
These same narratives of masculine control are what propel anti-climate, pro-fossil fuel policy in this current administration. Trump’s stated goal with his Department of Energy, now led by fracking CEO Chris Wright, is to “unleash [a] aolden era of American energy dominance.” He’s also created the National Energy Dominance Council to bolster fossil fuel exploitation of our climate, of indigenous lands, and of communities of color. The through line is that these men are trying to dominate.
We see this also in popular narratives against climate action. Professional misogynist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate wrote in a now-infamous Twitter exchange, ultimately leading to his arrest, “@GretaThunberg, please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” attaching an image of his collection of over 33 sports cars.
Writing about the exchange, author Rebecca Solnit wrote: “There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference—individualism taken to its extremes—are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.”
Flaunting dominance over people and nature is deemed manly, whilst care is deemed as unmanly. And, taking action with respect to justice, the environment, or our collective future—as epitomized by Greta Thunberg—is deemed as womanly.
It’s all, ultimately, about building logics for masculine control across every area of our lives, bodies, and world.
To Fight This, Our Movements Must Be Deeply Cross-Sectional
These dynamics don’t care for separations between environment and climate or climate and reproduction—it’s all a question of exploitation and increased power and domination for the white male ultra-wealthy few. To face this, our movements for justice, too, must be just as deeply intersectional.
The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, a storied reproductive justice organization, defines “Reproductive Justice [as] the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities” (italics added).
There is no reproductive justice without ending fossil fuel expansion. There is no reproductive justice without a just, Indigenous, and worker-led societal transformation to renewable, community-controlled energy.
It means placing bodily autonomy at the center of our fight for climate justice, and breaking down the divides between our movements.
It’s time for us to incorporate reproductive justice just as deeply into our fight for climate justice. That means for us in the climate space to show up at our local abortion clinic to protect patients; it means connecting with and learning from local reproductive justice organizers in our area; and it means bringing in a reproductive justice platform into our climate policy. It doesn’t just mean supporting Planned Parenthood; it means listening to the Reproductive Justice movement and finding the local fights, whether legislative or practical, near you, and getting involved. It means funding local abortion funds that are always in need of donations, like those affiliated with the grassroots National Network of Abortion Funds.
It means placing bodily autonomy at the center of our fight for climate justice, and breaking down the divides between our movements. It means rejecting centrist politicians like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who claim leadership on reproductive rights and climate justice, while vetoing legislation to protect those seeking reproductive and gender-affirming care and fast-tracking new fossil fuel pipelines.
There is no other way to face the capitalist fossil-fueled heteropatriarchical oligarchy that has now overtaken our government and seeks to dominate us all.
Climate justice is reproductive justice.
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Trump's Fascist National Security Strategy Is Full of Hemispheric Menace
The document promotes white supremacism, xenophobic nationalism, militant patriarchy, and takes a brazenly imperialist approach to Latin America.
Dec 13, 2025
On Thursday, December 4, the White House released a new National Security Strategy, a document that lays out the Trump regime’s “America First” designs on the world order.
The Trump regime’s new United States National Security Strategy (hereafter the “T47NSS”) is a significantly fascist as well as classically imperialist document.
Channeling far-right racist “Great Replacement Theory” and the notion of creeping “white genocide,” the T47NSS claims that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” because of loose immigration policies. It commits the US to “promoting European greatness” by aligning with “patriotic European parties” that want to keep their nations majority white.
This is a call for US to promote racist and xenophobic nationalist, blood and soil, neofascist, white-nationalist parties like German’s Alternative for Germany (AfD), Vox (Spain), Austria’s Freedom Party, the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, the Swedish Democrats, the Danish People’s Party, the Brothers of Italy (Lega), France’s National Rally, and the like.
It is... an appeal for the US to drop egalitarian and missionary pretense while unabashedly pursuing nothing but raw profitable advantage in dealing with other nations.
The T47NSS calls for the US to “deepen ties” with “the healthy nations of Eastern, Central, and Southern Europe,” by which the administration means nations where authoritarian, racist, nativist, and patriarchal parties hold power.
Not satisfied to promote just 2 of the 3 great pillars of neofascism—white supremacism and xenophobic nationalism—the document makes a full-throated cry to the third—militant patriarchy—by declaring that the Trump regime wants to create a new American “golden age” that “cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong traditional families.” That is not-so veiled code language for the rolling back of women’s, gay, and trans rights in the US—a curious thing to be advocating in a foreign policy document.
Along the way, the T47NSS channels the fascist cult of personality with laudatory references to President Donald Trump and his supposed superior vision, which is said to be bringing about a “course correction” steering the US away from what Trump calls (in a cover letter at the front of the document) “disasters and catastrophes” rooted in the “weakness” imposed by the “extremism” of “radical gender ideology” and “woke lunacy.”
Contrary to myth, fascism is imperialist, not “isolationist.” The T47NSS’ much ballyhooed call for a retreat from supposedly democratic US-America’s supposed democracy- and freedom-promotion in Russia, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America is not at all an argument for US global retreat. It is instead an appeal for the US to drop egalitarian and missionary pretense while unabashedly pursuing nothing but raw profitable advantage in dealing with other nations.
The T47NSS takes a brazenly imperialist approach to Latin America. It calls for the US to “enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere,” “protect… our access to key geographies throughout the region,” restrict Latin American immigration, prevent non-US companies from winning business contracts in Latin America, and “enlist” pro-US and pro-business governments across the region in support of US regional dominance.
That makes for some darkly interesting reading as the US commits cold-blooded extrajudicial executions of Venezuelan and Colombian people in the Caribbean and prepares for a possibly imminent regime change war on Venezuela. The T47NSS’ call for the US to shift its global military footprint more heavily onto the Western Hemisphere—away from more distant “theaters whose relative import to American national security has declined”—suggests that the Trump fascist regime’s ongoing war crimes and ominous military buildup in the Caribbean will continue and indeed intensify. The document is rightly seen as menacing by Latin Americans and most especially by the people of Venezuela and Colombia.
The T47NSS calls for the US to sustain America's “military overmatch” of China to deter its chief competitor state in the Western Pacific. That contradicts not just the notion of the Trump regime as isolationist but also the notion that the regime is content to grant China unchallenged dominance in its own regional sphere of influence.
Trump’s NSS cover letter is darkly amusing. It says that “America is strong and respected again and because of that we are making peace all over the world”—this as the Trump regime is shown to have criminally executed more than 80 mariners and boat passengers in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific over the last three months and as the Trump Pentagon assembles massive military assets for a likely criminal regime change war on Venezuela. So far the Trump regime’s aggression against Venezuela has graduated from the criminal serial killer boat strikes to declaring the air space over that country closed to flying fighter jets over the nation to seizing a Venezuelan oil tanker just off the nation’s coast, an act of brazen piracy capped by trump claiming the US will “keep the [interdicted ship’s] oil.”
Trump is also threatening to attack Colombia, saying this about that nation’s left president: “He’ll be next soon. I hope he’s listening, he’s going to be next.”
It is likely that the US is more disrespected around the world than it has ever been under Trump47.Keep ReadingShow Less
'Good Genes,' Anti-Abortion Laws, Declining Birth Rates, and What They Have in Common
Promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years.
Oct 12, 2025
From American Eagle’s campaign with Sydney Sweeney to the Trump administration’s efforts to limit access to birth control to the US birth rate hitting an all-time low, there has been a lot of noise online this summer, and every time something takes center stage, people come out of the woodwork telling us to not get distracted. To stay focused.
And I get it. I do. It’s a lot.
But we can’t just overlook one headline in favor of another, because in America, promoting good genes and limiting access to birth control and abortion are inextricably tied by two threads: white supremacy and the patriarchy. And they have been for more than 150 years—ever since the first time abortion was criminalized in America in the late 1800s.
In the words of Leslie Reagan (author of When Abortion Was a Crime): “White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among Protestant women.”
When he wrote of American westward expansion, he asked: “Shall [these regions] be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
Back in 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women’s Health rolled back the protections granted by Roe v. Wade, the justices claimed to have reached the majority ruling, in part, because abortion rights weren’t “deeply rooted in the country’s history and traditions.” But here’s the thing: America had a long-standing tradition of abortion before it became widely outlawed in the late 1800s. In fact, for much of American history, terminating a pregnancy during the first four months wasn’t even considered abortion. It was simply an attempt to “restore menses.”
Before the end of the 19th century, a regular menstrual flow was considered essential to a woman’s health. Herbalists, midwives, and physicians recommended childbearing people sip herbal emmenagogic teas (teas that stimulate menstrual flow) in the days leading up to and throughout the course of their periods to maintain regularity and to restore menstruation if it arrived late.
It was this tradition that politicians and some doctors of the era (specifically those who were a part of the newly-created American Medical Association) wanted to eliminate.
The AMA was founded in 1847, creating a professional group for college-educated doctors (all men at the time). They were faced with a problem: The medical profession was still establishing itself, and so AMA doctors weren’t well-respected in America, but midwives, one of their primary competitors in the field, were. One of the many reasons for this was that midwives were willing to provide abortion services, something AMA-recognized physicians were unwilling to do because they claimed it violated the Hippocratic Oath.
One particular physician, Horatio Robinson Storer, saw abortion as an opportunity to help accredited physicians gain respect: If they could turn abortion into a moral issue, they could destroy public respect for midwives—allowing AMA physicians to take over the field of gynecological health and establish themselves as both the moral and scientific authority on medicine.
With the AMA at his back, in 1857 Storer started a campaign to change the way America thought about abortion—sending letters to physicians and newspapers, publishing books, and eventually working with legislatures to criminalize the practice.
What else was happening in 1857? The lead up to the American Civil War, which we all know was fueled by white supremacy. Not only was much of America fighting for the right to enslave people, they also feared being outnumbered by the very people they were trying to enslave. And with the declining birth rates among white, Protestant women, it was a well-founded fear (and one that wasn’t only limited to the South, especially with the influx of immigrants in northern cities).
Storer used this fear to his advantage.
When he wrote of American westward expansion, he asked: “Shall [these regions] be filled by our own children or by those of aliens? This is a question our women must answer; upon their loins depends the future destiny of the nation.”
The argument was a powerful one—one that changed the way America viewed abortion for 100 years. How did they do it? By destroying the concept of quickening, thereby reclassifying the restoration of menses as abortion and criminalizing those who practiced it. They stated quickening was little more than a feeling, and a feeling wasn’t medicine. This in turn discredited childbearing people as the ones who knew their own bodies best.
The AMA’s efforts culminated in the Comstock Law in 1873, which made the public discussion of birth control and abortion illegal by banning it as obscenity, and by 1880, every state had laws restricting abortion. Early-term abortion, which had once been considered an essential part of women’s healthcare, was labeled evil (and criminal) and midwives were rebranded as abortionists. These views of abortion continued for 100 years until Roe v. Wade gave people with uteruses the right to an abortion, and it’s clear they’ve persisted in the decades since.
Now, to be clear, most doctors today recognize abortion as healthcare. This isn’t meant to demonize modern-day physicians. But as we look to today’s headlines when it comes to the health of childbearing people, it’s almost impossible not to draw parallels, and keep this reality in mind as we fight to regain the rights the Supreme Court has stripped us of.
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